The trail of destruction left in Didsbury by the flood - and the fear that the system can't cope with another

Three weeks on from Storm Franklin and the landscape is still scarred.

The storm saw the River Mersey's levels rise to an all time high, putting hundreds of homes in south Manchester at risk.

But the opening of Didsbury's floodgates diverted the water over the green spaces which make up part of Didsbury Flood Storage Reservoir, like Fletcher Moss Park, saving people's properties from being deluged.

READ MORE: 'It was like a hen night, not an evacuation!' The people rushed out of their homes in the dead of night come together in the face of Storm Franklin

The emergency action left Fletcher Moss waterlogged and littered with wreckage. Pathways have been washed away, memorial benches have been displaced, and debris covers the boardwalk.

Meanwhile, damage has been done to the landscape's infrastructure as the Environment Agency had to fell trees to help the flow of flood water. Restoring the landscape will be a significant task - and volunteers believe that the damage could have been minimised with better planning.

A spokesperson for the Friends of Fletcher Moss Park said: “This is the third year of the park flooding.

“Before that, it was a very rare event and it only became a flood basin in the 1970s. We now anticipate that this may now be a yearly event with global warming.

“The problem this year is that the Environment Agency took down a lot of trees in one section below houses in order to increase the flow of the water.

“They felled an awful lot, they chopped a lot of trees down - 40 or 50 trees in order to increase the flow of the water, but increasing the flow of water has caused a lot more damage. They were protecting the houses above, and we get that.

“But if that woodland had been managed properly where they